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Bazel has a feature that lets you see a graph of your build dependencies. It could help you debug things, but honestly it’s just really cool to see what your build is doing.

To try it out, you’ll need a project that uses Bazel to build. If you don’t have one handy, here’s a tiny workspace you can use:

Now run bazel query in your tiny-workspace/ directory, asking it to search for all dependencies of //:main and format the output as a graph:

$ bazel query 'deps(//:main)' --output graph > graph.in

This creates a file called graph.in, which is a text representation of the build graph. You can use dot (install with sudo apt-get install graphviz) to create a png from this:

$ dot -Tpng < graph.in > graph.png

If you open up graph.png, you should see something like this:

You can see //:main depends on one file (//:main.cc) and four targets (//:x, //tools/cpp:stl, //tools/default:crosstool, and //tools/cpp:malloc). All of the //tools targets are implicit dependencies of any C++ target: every C++ build you do needs the right compiler, flags, and libraries available, but it crowds your result graph. You can exclude these implicit dependencies by removing them from your query results: